You know, sometimes you just have to give thanks to whatever gods there be for the invention of basic cable. Like today, for example, when Turner Classic Movies is showing some of the best and worst fantasy flicks ever made, ranging from Ray Harryhausen's 1961 special effects masterpiece Mysterious Island (featuring the stop-motion animated giant crab of your dreams) to the 1959 small-dogs-dressed-in-rug-remnants classic The Killer Shrews (a film later memorably skewered by Mystery Science Theater 3000 but still best appreciated in its original form, sans wisecracking robots). For sheer inadvertent wackiness, however, the day's winner is clear -- it's George Pal's 1961 cheese apotheosis Atlantis, The Lost Continent (10:45am EST, and if you have a DVR pounce -- for some reason, it's not on home video at the moment).

The story, briefly:

Greek fisherman Demetrios (Sal Ponti, doing business under the unconvincing nom de cinema of Anthony Hall) and his father rescue a beautiful shipwrecked woman with very poor people skills who, unbeknownst to them, is actually a Princess from the technologically advanced island civilization of Atlantis. Demetrios puts her in a fishing boat (she's not thrilled with the smell) and returns her to her homeland, where he's promptly thrown into slavery. Meanwhile, the senile old King of Atlantis is being manipulated by an ambitious usurper (thoroughly bad actor John Dall) with the help of an evil sorcerer (future F-Troop Indian chief Frank DeKova), and the only person who can possibly thwart his plans for world conquest is a kindly high priest (future Get Smart Chief Edward Platt). There's lots more, including an underground lab where a mad scientist turns men into animals via hypnosis and a lot of stock footage from Quo Vadis, but you get the idea.

Oh -- and there's a big unconvincing volcano and the island sinks at the finale.

Here's the original trailer -- narrated by the great Paul Frees (voice of Boris Badenov on Rocky and Bullwinkle) -- to prove that I'm not making any of this up.

Obviously, there's just so much to admire about this film, not the least of which is that it inspired one of the snidest (if not 100 percent accurate) reviews of its day. Writing in The New York Times, Bosley Crowther -- no fan of genre movies -- concluded his, uh, pan thusly:

"For our taste, the most rewarding moment comes when Berry Kroeger in the role of the hypnotizing wizard who turns slaves into pigs, fixes the eye of one of his victims and says, "Repeat after me: every day in every way I'm getting to be a boar."

As you can see in the trailer, Crowther didn't get that quote exactly right, but hey -- this was the same New York Times that in the Nineties invented Whitewater.